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Chapter Forty-Six
They gave me hypnosis, Thorazine, Ritalin, imprisonment, kisses on my ass, and threats. They told me if I didn’t let them take care of my problem right away, I’d have difficulty with interpersonal relationships the rest of my life. They were right about that.
—WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS JR.1
1. Billy Jr.
Bill’s lease ran out in June 1976 and he originally intended to move into the Bunker at 222 Bowery. All the cleaning and preparation had been done, partitions installed, and the concrete floor scrubbed, but Bill had asked Howard Brookner to paint the floor “Battleship Grey” and it had not yet dried so Bill spent several weeks with James and Richard in the floor-through loft at 43 Great Jones Street that they shared with their friends Richard and Jody Harris before taking the train to Boulder in mid-July, where he was to spend two weeks teaching at Naropa. Bill took an apartment at the Varsity Townhouse at 1555 Broadway, a group of three-story, balconied, mansarded red buildings with the Flatirons, the first low range of the Rockies, as backdrop. Richard and James took another apartment there. When the students returned in mid-August they all moved to the Boulderado Hotel, where Bill had one of the corner “tower” rooms on the fifth floor. They had all been looking forward to a quiet summer because Allen Ginsberg’s father was ill and they assumed he would be in Paterson, sitting at Louis’s bedside. But Louis had died, and as James told Bill’s friend and French translator Claude Pélieu, “now it’s all over and there he’ll be, knocking at the door every morning with a list of media people to see and events to attend—oh well, all I can charitably say is, he means well.”2
Allen used his background in market research and advertising to promote the causes and the people he admired or believed in. At Naropa he was shameless in advertising the involvement of members of the so-called Beat Generation (he even used Kerouac’s name for the department). Mostly Burroughs was prepared to meet people and give interviews, but Allen’s full-on proselytizing could be exhausting. Burroughs was only teaching in order to make money; he was not a Buddhist. In fact his attitude was summed up in The Soft Machine: “And not innarested to contact your tired old wisdom of the East disgust me to see it.”3
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Nineteen seventy-six was the year of Billy’s illness. Billy Jr. was already in Boulder with his new girlfriend, Georgette Larrouy, when Bill, James, Richard, and Steven Lowe arrived for the July season. Bill took one look at him and knew that something was seriously wrong. Billy was coughing up blood in alarming quantities, but his doctor, a Seventh-Day Adventist, hadn’t made the obvious diagnosis; he thought it was “nerves.” Billy had another hemorrhage and James called his uncle Dr. Pat Barelli in Kansas City, who recommended Dr. Ewing. Dr Ewing immediately diagnosed cirrhosis and said it would be fatal unless he had a liver transplant. He could have a shunt bypass operation but that would only gain him about a year, at most. He drew diagrams and explained to Bill how the blood cannot pass through the damaged liver and backs up. Bill went to see Georgette and Billy’s wife, Karen, at the Yeshe House and started to explain it to them but broke down in tears. Georgette said, “Oh shit!” and put her arm around him to comfort him. Then Billy had a third hemorrhage and was transferred to Colorado General in Denver for an emergency portocaval shunt procedure. He had lost a lot of blood. The bypass was unsuccessful and Billy was taken into intensive care in a coma. It looked as if he would die. His only hope was a liver transplant.
Karen, Georgette, Bill, and James all stayed in Denver, waiting for a liver donor to appear. Even if a donor was found, it was a very risky operation, with a 30 percent mortality rate on the table. Then, with just twenty-four hours before they thought Billy would die, a liver became available. Bill had to sign a paper and so did Karen. Bill signed but Karen hesitated. She wanted to know who the donor was, but they couldn’t tell her because it was confidential information. Then she wanted to know about another clause. “It’s permission to use an experimental drug. We can’t operate without it,” they explained. Bill lost his temper with her: “For God’s sake sign the paper and shut up,” he yelled. She signed the paper. The operation was conducted by Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, who performed the first successful human liver transplant in 1967 and is known as “the father of modern transplantation.” They spent hours sitting in the waiting room until the staff told them to go home. “We’ll call you,” they said. The operation took eighteen hours. It appeared to be a success. Anne Waldman commented, “It was so painful at the hospital. You actually saw William Burroughs defeated, weeping, remorseful—very human things.”4
The first five days after a transplant are crucial, and there is always a relapse after ten days, due to tissue rejection. It all has to be managed very carefully, and at one point Dr. Starzl upbraided his nurses for not following his instructions to the letter. Sometimes Billy’s behavior was psychotic and he yelled at his nurses because the steroids he was on made him argumentative. They had been warned that steroids make people angry and self-righteous, and it was an expected symptom. Bill didn’t see too great a change in his personality, except that he had odd lapses of memory. Billy finally recovered but he was in hospital for five months. James and Richard Elovich drove Bill to Denver to visit Billy three or four times each week in a borrowed Jeep until they returned to New York at the end of November. Bill stayed on to be close to Billy, making occasional short trips to New York to take care of business.
In January 1977 Billy was discharged and Burroughs rented a room for him at the Boulderado Hotel in Boulder. He gave him a Royal manual typewriter and Billy wrote the two-hundred-page manuscript Prakriti Junction there, helped by Alan Davies, a young Canadian poet. Burroughs stayed on all winter to be near him, giving a winter course at Naropa to help pay the expenses. He sometimes had to leave town to make money, such as a European reading tour from September 19 until October 10, beginning in Berlin, otherwise he saw him every day. Billy should really have had full-time care or have been in sheltered accommodation. He had a breakdown; he threw as much of his furniture as he could out of his fifth-floor window at the Boulderado, including the chairs. The hotel ejected him.
It is a terrible thing for a parent to see his child gravely ill; the positions are expected to be in reverse. For Burroughs it was painful not just because of Billy’s illness, but for its underlying cause. All his life Billy had always wanted to be loved and respected by his father and his drinking and drug taking were all pathetic attempts to be cool, to show Bill that he was continuing the bohemian tradition. Billy’s illness forced Bill to confront the fact that he had been a lousy father and had badly neglected his son. The rift between them was now so great that it could not possibly be mended. Burroughs had not only killed Joan, depriving Billy of a mother throughout his childhood, but had denied him a father as well by leaving him in the hands of his grandparents and not visiting for years on end.
2. The Bunker
In December 1976, Bill finally moved into 222 Bowery, known as the Bunker, between Prince and Spring. It was built in 1884–85 to house the Young Men’s Institute, the first New York branch of the YMCA. In 1915 a rear three-story addition was built to provide a swimming pool, an enlarged gym, and a locker room.5 It was the locker room that William moved into, below the gym, which used to be Mark Rothko’s studio, and above the abandoned swimming pool. The first artist to live there was Fernand Léger in 1940–41 after he escaped the war in France. Next door was the Prince Hotel, a flophouse for Bowery bums, who were regularly found frozen to death on the doorstep in winter. The Bowery Mission and the Salvation Army were directly across the street. Wynn Chamberlain had a loft upstairs, where Burroughs had given a reading back in 1965, and importantly, John Giorno lived in the building in a loft overlooking the Bowery. It was to become a legendary address for Burroughs along with the Beat Hotel, but he only lived there continuously for three years, all of 1979 until 1981; the drug years.
The loft was one huge space with a concrete floor and windows that were inches from the opposite wall outside. These they painted over. When James and Richard lived there David Prentice had built stud-walling to divide the space into an office, a bedroom, and a large living space with an open-plan kitchen at one side. Everything was painted white. The concrete floor was scrubbed. The locker-room bathroom still contained a row of urinals, cubicles, and a choice of sinks. The space was very live; it echoed slightly and there was a hum caused by the fridge. In Bill’s bedroom six heating pipes and three drainage pipes ran floor to ceiling in the corner to the right of his bed and there was a sprinkler system on the ceiling. Andy Warhol described the Bunker in his diaries: “There’s no windows. It’s all white and neat and looks like sculpture all over, the way the pipes are. Bill sleeps in another room, on the floor.”6 Richard’s father’s conference table and chairs next to the kitchen became the focal point of the loft. Some of Brion’s paintings of the Sahara were hung, but the Bunker remained bare, functional, a place for work and the exchange of ideas.
Burroughs returned to Boulder in February 1977 in order to be near Billy, taking apartment 415 on the fourth floor of Varsity Manor, 1155 Marine. (Burroughs pronounced it “man-OR.”) There were breaks for readings such as the Chapel Hill Arts Festival held in North Carolina in March, where he appeared with Allen Ginsberg and John Cage. The most memorable reading from this period was in Washington, D.C., at the Corcoran Gallery. Bill and James, Allen and Peter Orlovsky stayed with the Washington hostess Amy Huntington Block in Georgetown where they could look across the street at Henry Kissinger’s house. Amy pointed out all the boys walking around the street and explained that they serviced the foreign embassies. The boys were watched by the Secret Service but not interfered with as they waited to be invited indoors or for a limo to pick them up. At the Corcoran Burroughs read “When did I stop wanting to be President” to the cream of D.C. society; there was nervous laughter and a few walkouts. The dinner afterward was attended by Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, and his wife; his predecessor William Colby; James Angleton, chief of CIA counterintelligence; and other government bigwigs. James sat next to a Supreme Court Justice. Burroughs was delighted. “[Robert] McNamara7 was one of my fans. I was treated like royalty! I did have the feeling it was sort of like a small town atmosphere. […] She was a marvelous hostess.”8 Bill and James stayed with Mrs. Block several times when they were in Washington.
3. Junky
The Junky project began in the spring of 1977 with a phone call from Joe Bianco, Jacques Stern’s lawyer, a dark, roly-poly child prodigy, always chuckling and smiling, who had made a fortune in commodities by the time he was twenty-three. He had helped Jacques crack several of his trust funds. Stern had seen the new edition of Junky, published in March, and wanted to make a movie out of it. Bill and James went to discuss it at his penthouse on 57th Street. The living room was dominated by a huge grand piano but there was very little furniture; Jacques needed the space to zoom around in his wheelchair. James said that Jacques was the only cripple he ever saw who could pace in a wheelchair: he paced and raved, watched over by two medical nurses who helped him in and out of his chair, administered his medicines, and listened passively as he cussed them out.
Jacques had a hospital syringe with 60ccs of liquid cocaine in it, the needle sticking in his wrist, the plunger half pressed as he raved to them that he would get Samuel Beckett to act in the film. He grabbed the phone and called France, the syringe still hanging from his wrist, and began talking as if he were connected to Beckett: “Hello, Beckett. You’ve read Junky by William Burroughs? Yes. Right. I want you to play Old Ike in the movie that we’re making. What? You don’t want to? Well fuck you, you old fraud!”
The project was their reunion with Terry Southern, whom, like Jacques, Bill had known at the Beat Hotel. Terry brought in his old friend Dennis Hopper to direct, and it quickly became obvious that they were there for the cocaine and the money and that the film meant little to them. Bill received $20,000 for the option on the book—a huge sum then—and Dennis and Terry each got the same. Bill and James, Terry and Dennis walked out of Joe Bianco’s condo at River House and went straight to the bank. Afterward they celebrated in an expensive French restaurant in Murray Hill. James took a year’s lease on an apartment on the twenty-sixth floor at 7 Park Avenue at 34th Street. He was trying to become a literary agent and wanted a Midtown address.
It was a period of dinners at One Fifth Avenue and visits to Terry Southern, who was ensconced at the Gramercy Park Hotel writing the script in a haze of cocaine. Typists ran in and out, taking things to be xeroxed, and there were pages of script everywhere, typed on different-colored papers, the Hollywood method of distinguishing between rewrites. Terry kept writing scenes that weren’t in the book; a cocktail party with businessmen standing around saying, “My company recycles used condoms.” Terry and Dennis were both working on the script and getting expenses, most of which went up their noses. James thought the book should be treated as a period piece and shot as a costume drama of the forties. There were pointless meetings with Jacques Stern at the Stanhope Hotel. At one of these Bill, James, and Terry turned up but not Dennis. After forty-five minutes, Stern, furious and raging, wheeled himself down to the lobby. When Hopper finally arrived, in his leather-fringed suede coat and leather hat, he apologized: “Jacques, I’m sorry I’m late.” As guests milled around the lobby, trying to check in or out, Stern stabbed a finger at him and screamed, “You’re not late, you miserable ass, you’re fired! Get out! You’re through! Over!”9 Terry stayed close to the money, murmuring, “Jacques is a grand guy, really a grand guy!” But with Dennis gone there was no backing, despite Jacques Stern’s claim that he had a four-picture deal from the French Film Board, and the project folded, as expected.
Chapter Fourteen
Sometimes you get, sometimes you get got.
—OLD TEXAN SAYING
1. Burroughs in East Texas
Burroughs bought ninety-nine acres outside Huntsville in Walker County, East Texas, in November 1946, for $2,000. The nearest community was New Waverly, a town of a few hundred people, Conroe was the nearest town of any size, and Houston was sixty miles away. The farm was at the end of a logging road cut through the woods and lacked both electricity and running water. There was a weathered silver-gray single-story cabin that had two enormous rooms, subdivided into four, with a porch taking up the long side and several vine-covered tumbledown barns, all surrounded by wild berry thickets. Huncke once described the structure as having an open passage through the middle; this would have been a traditional Texas “dog trot” designed to cause a breeze and cool the building in the summer. A black potbellied stove in the kitchen provided the only heat. They instigated repairs on the house then drove to New York ten days before Christmas, where they stayed for a few days before Bill went to see his family and Joan went to Loudonville to collect Julie and take her to her new home on January 2.
The house needed work and they obviously needed help. Before they even moved in they decided to invite Herbert Huncke to come and help fix the place up, and he agreed, having just come out of the Bronx jail with nowhere to live and no source of income. Bill sent fifty dollars for a train ticket and meals on board, but Huncke dipped into the money and finished up taking the bus, which took much longer. He started out high and forgot the marijuana seeds that he was supposed to bring; by the time he reached Texas he was in withdrawal. Fortunately Bill had been receiving supplies of powdered pantopon from Garver and was able to fix him up.
Bill, Joan, and Julie were staying at a tourist camp while slowly hauling provisions into the farm. Joan told Allen, “We have a Jeep, which while it bounces intolerably, is an incredible blessing as it actually navigates our road, flooded as it is by five days of steady rain. So now we can carry loads in, things are looking up.”1 The priority was to provide water. Bill installed a seven-hundred-gallon water cistern on a wooden stand to collect all the rainwater that fell on the corrugated iron roof and a filter system to strain out any bugs. Next he investigated the possibility of a well. Nobody in that part of Texas would ever dig for water without having the “water witch,” so Bill hired one to come and dowse the land. The water witch walked around until his wand dipped. He told Bill, “Go down there so many feet and there’s the water.” The amount the wand dipped indicated where the water was and how deep down it was. This ability apparently ran in families; Bill tried using the wand and felt nothing. The water was exactly where the water witch said it would be. The well was dug by a tethered mule, walking in an endless circle, digging out the earth, and was lined with concrete tubes that fitted onto each other. In the house the porch had to be screened to keep out bugs, and the roof leaked. It was several months before the plumbing worked properly.
As usual, Burroughs got a few routines out if it. In the “County Clerk” section of The Naked Lunch, possibly one of the funniest as well as the most powerful indictments of Texas small-town racism, anti-Semitism, and prejudice ever written, Arch, the County Clerk, rambles on about the local good ol’ boys: “Feller name of Hump Clarence used to witch out wells on the side… Good ol’ boy too, not a finer man in this Zone than Hump Clarence.”2
The land sloped away from the house down to a bayou filled with frogs, toads, crawfish, and catfish, surrounded by semitropical undergrowth and swampland and home to all manner of chiggers and mites, mosquitoes and tics, scorpions and water snakes. Armadillos wandered across the paths in the woods and chameleons would mate in the trees, their rose-colored throats blowing up like huge bubbles. The dirt road leading in was so narrow at times that you could reach out and touch the trees on either side. There was a rickety plank bridge over a stream. Bill fenced part of the land to keep out deer and planted tomatoes as a cover crop to divert attention from the marijuana plants and opium poppies hidden among persimmon trees and oaks draped in Spanish moss. The tomatoes must have been planted by hired hands, but he would not have trusted anyone else to plant pot seeds for him, so the notion of Bill’s pot farm is most certainly incorrect. It is unlikely that any more than a quarter acre of his ninety-seven acres could have been planted with cannabis; hardly a “pot farm.”3
Each morning, at about 10:30, Bill would appear on the porch from his room, dressed in his suit and tie. He would take the Jeep into New Waverly to collect the mail and buy the local newspapers and then sit on the porch in his rocking chair and read. Huncke, not surprisingly, was not much good as a field hand, so his job was to collect kindling and firewood from the woods for the outdoor grill and to cook the steaks in the evening. He was also in charge of the wind-up Victrola, changing the needle from time to time. Joan built a pinewood cabinet to amplify the sound. They sometimes argued over the records, Bill preferring Viennese waltzes and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, whereas Huncke and Joan liked Stan Kenton and Lester Young, Josh White’s version of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” Hoagy Carmichael’s “Baltimore Oriole,” Coleman Hawkins’s “Low Flame,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “Night in Tunisia.” The music was absorbed into the trees as they sat on the porch by the light of the kerosene lamps, the records accompanied by cicadas, night birds, and strange cries of animals in the forest.
The idea of Huncke, the skinny, sallow-faced Times Square hustler, working as a farmhand is as extraordinary as Burroughs’s idea that he could hide away in the woods without everyone in a hundred-mile radius knowing about it. Huncke was incompetent at most things but does seem to have made himself useful. Bill remembered, “He got on my nerves to some extent. He gets on anyone’s nerves, but not to an overwhelming extent because he’s a minor irritation.” In fact Huncke settled in surprisingly well. He wrote to Allen, “Bill is a good friend. He is exceedingly interested in guns. He has allowed me to shoot and I find them much less awe inspiring. Bill is quite a guy.”4 Bill was using a .22 target pistol. He stood in back of the cabin and aimed at the barn. The sound echoed through the woods. One time Huncke and Joan got talking to the pharmacist in a small town some distance away and the man said, “You guys must be the fellows I hear through the woods. We thought you were shooting off machine guns over there.” Huncke reported, “That just tickled the shit out of Burroughs. Such strutting was never known.”5 It had been Joan’s suggestion that Huncke should come to the farm; she wanted the Benzedrine company.
Naturally Bill’s neighbors were very curious to know what brought this Harvard-educated gentleman to live as a subsistence farmer in East Texas, and Bill soon got to know them. Arch Ellisor was very friendly indeed. He loved whiskey and Bill would invite him onto the porch, get out a bottle, and encourage him to tell stories. Arch’s grandmother was dying of cancer and Arch would tell Bill, “Her breast is all eaten away.” He hoped that she would die soon. Arch Ellisor is a character, under his own name, in The Place of Dead Roads, where his old grandmother gets swept away by a tornado. “Everybody was glad to see the last of her, she’d been clear out of her mind the past five years, her breasts all eated away with the cancer and Arch kept buying morphine to finish her off but she had such a strength for it no amount would kill her and Arch said it was like buying feed for a hawg.”6 The day she died Arch came over to tell Bill and they celebrated with a big slug of whiskey. The Ellisor family also make an appearance in Cities of the Red Night. “Only two families hereabouts, the Bradfords and the Ellisors.”7 Steve Ellisor comes to help clean and repair a riverside shack that seems to have arrived in the novel from a future book. The title of the section perhaps gives a clue: “I can take the hut set anywhere.” It does not appear again.
Bill had another neighbor, Mr. Gilley, who was always coming onto Bill’s property looking for his “brindle-faced cow.” One time he encountered Bill when he was out with his axe in the pot plantation. Bill immediately steered him to the house, offering him some whiskey. Gilley knew something suspicious was going on but didn’t know what. He said, “Well, pretty good stand of it you got there, whatever it is.” Gilley was very much a rural mooch. When Bill bought a second car, as well as his Jeep, Gilley opined, “A rich man who got himself another car, I figure he’d just about give that Jeep to a poor man.”
Judging by his letters to Ginsberg, Burroughs seemed to be enjoying himself. On March 11, he boasted to Allen, “It is practically summer down here, and king size scorpions, Tarantulas, Ticks, chiggers and mosquitoes are emerging in droves. I killed 10 scorpions yesterday. The house is overrun with huge rats as big as possums.”8 Bill shot one that was so fat it got wedged in its hole. He said he was contemplating the purchase of a ferret. It was a worthy challenge for an experienced exterminator like Burroughs. Joan wrote Allen, “Already we’re being attacked by hordes of all sorts of dreadful bugs, including scorpions, to which William has taken quite a fancy.”9
In the summer the fields were ablaze with flowers, hibiscus bushes, huge blossoms, everything lush and fecund. There was a large pond not far from the cabin where some previous occupants had built out a spit of sand into the water. Joan liked to sit down on the sand with the water up to her belly and play with Julie. It was her favorite place during the heat of the summer and sometimes she and Huncke would take a lunch basket with them and spend all day there. Two-year-old Julie followed her everywhere she went, barefoot, hair matted, chewing on her arm, a nervous habit she had developed that left a large scar in the crook of her arm.
But this sylvan idyll was flawed. Joan was still seriously strung out and, if anything, her Benzedrine habit increased. She looked after Julie and shared the cooking with Huncke, sometimes shopping with him, but much of her time was spent obsessively cleaning, first the cabin and porch, then in sweeping lizards off the tree in the yard. The moment she turned away, they would climb back. In New Waverly Joan and Huncke continued the same speed-freak discussions about white filaments that they could see coming out of their skin that they’d had at 115th Street; typical amphetamine hallucinations. Joan had an animated vision, similar to her audio hallucinations. She would look down the sidewalk and see everyone moving as a unit, like a shoal of fish, then she would say, “Next thing you’ll see them going down that side,” and to her they’d be going the other way. Bill never paid much heed to it, recognizing it for what it was, Benzedrine psychosis.
Joan’s two-inhaler-a-day Benzedrine habit meant that they soon cleaned out the nearby pharmacies, and it was Huncke’s job to make runs into Houston every two or three weeks, where he had found a drugstore that would supply inhalers by the gross and paregoric by the half gallon. He also scored for pot and shopped for liquor. They were living in a dry county and had bought all the rum, tequila, and gin in the nearby towns, so had to drive the twenty-five miles to the big liquor store in Conroe to stock up. Unfortunately Houston proved an enormous attraction to Huncke, and sometimes he would not return to the Jeep at the appointed time. Once they waited so long for him that the ice, which they had come to town to buy, had all melted. Another time he scored and disappeared for days.
Huncke had grown very close to Joan in New York and had initially been surprised to find that she and Bill had a physical relationship. Living with them in Texas enabled him to further observe them together, and in his memoirs he wrote:
I believe he did respect her, as she was very intelligent and could match him wit for wit. But as far as love—in the accepted sense of the word—I’m sure he had little or no deep affection for her. She was interesting to him in some way, that was all. He did not like to be annoyed by her too much, though she demanded he give her a little attention each night. Just before we’d all go to sleep she would spend maybe an hour with him in his room and they’d talk. She’d leave and go into the front of the cabin, which she used as her room.10
One night Huncke heard Joan tap on Burroughs’s door. The door opened and he heard her tell Bill, “All I want is to lie in your arms a little while.” There was never any outward sign of affection between them. Bill for his part said, “Joan was a very extraordinary person. We got along very well. I wouldn’t say I was in love. It was a very close relationship.”11 When they did have sex, it was apparently very good sex. Joan had said that though he claimed to be a faggot “you’re as good as a pimp in bed.” Burroughs revealed this in Howard Brookner’s documentary about him and afterward regretted it. “I’m terribly embarrassed about that bit about being as good as a pimp in bed, that sounds awful! I thought it was awful. I was a pretty good lay in those days, I had all my teeth, well anyway…”12 Still later he thought, “Goddamn it, I was a fuckin’ good lay even if I was a queer. Believe me, I could satisfy a woman! Nothing wrong with that. I’m thinking it over, I thought, ‘What the hell was I talking about?’ ”13
After Joan left Bellevue, she and Bill had stayed in a cheap hotel near Times Square, which was where Billy Jr. was conceived. Burroughs said, “They say women always know when they conceive, well I knew too. That was it.”14 When Joan confirmed that she was pregnant she asked Bill if they should get an abortion, but he said that he would not consider it under any circumstances. “I certainly would never have consented to an abortion. I’m against abortion, absolutely. I think it’s murder.”15 Despite such high-minded views about termination, he made little or no effort to get Joan to restrict her consumption of amphetamine, alcohol, and pot, even though it was obvious that they posed a considerable danger to the developing fetus. It was so against his principles to interfere in anyone else’s life that he would have regarded it as impertinence to criticize her behavior. As a consequence, Billy Jr. was born an amphetamine addict and went straight into withdrawal, crying all the time and very distressed. Joan was unable to breast-feed him because of her addiction.
They had made no arrangements for the birth. At 3:00 a.m. on July 21, 1947, Joan tapped on Bill’s door and told him it was time to go. They climbed into the Jeep and drove the eighteen miles to the hospital in Conroe. Instead of waiting around, biting his nails in the hospital, Bill returned to the Jeep, where he had a bottle. Someone had left a puppy on the seat. It was whining and barking. Billy was born at 4:10 a.m. and the next day Bill drove Joan back with their baby.
Bill’s parents paid a visit to the farm shortly after Billy was born, bringing with them all manner of baby clothes and equipment, including a cradle, delighted that Bill had produced a grandchild for them. Burroughs had been worrying about the visit but it went well, and he was able to tell Allen, “No complications arose from the parental visitation, on the contrary a shower of benefits.”16 Huncke was made to wear a cowboy hat and pretend to be a local, and Joan must have somehow hidden her amphetamine use from them.
We get a good, though possibly exaggerated, picture of Burroughs’s attitude to the new child from an interview with Joan conducted two years later at the New Orleans sanatorium, where Bill was detoxing. She was reported as saying that Burroughs was “a good father, and absolutely devoted to his young son. He is good to his stepchild, also, but ‘adores’ his own son, and seems almost as if he is seeking to be both mother and father to the child—has assumed most of the responsibility for feeding, washing and walking baby. […] Informant states that the patient ‘wasn’t aware’ that he wanted the child until it arrived, and now devotes himself to it almost completely.”17
On hearing of the birth of Billy Burroughs Jr., Allen Ginsberg set out to write a birthday ode. It took him six days, working late at night on Benzedrine. Like much of his work in this period, it was an epic work consisting of many sections, written in highly artificial rhymed verse and almost unintelligible. The section on bebop began, “The saxophone thy mind had guessed / He knows the Devil hides in thee; / Fly hence, I warn thee, Stranger, lest / The saxophone shall injure thee.”
Allen arranged to visit Bill and Joan that summer, bringing with him Neal Cassady, with whom he had been having an unsatisfactory love affair in Denver. Neal, a compulsive womanizer, ran between several women and very occasionally spent time in Allen’s bed. Using his considerable powers of persuasion, Allen managed to convince Cassady to accompany him on a visit to Burroughs’s farm, and they set out to hitchhike there. Rides were hard to get, but they finally arrived on August 30, 1947. Allen wrote, “When we got here, I expecting this happy holiday of God given sexuality, where was the royal couch?” There was no couch; in fact there was no bed at all. Huncke was still trying to build it. Huncke normally slept on the screened porch, so he thought that Allen and Neal might like to have his room, but his bed was not big enough for two people. Huncke explained that there were some army cots and wooden planks in one of the barns, and “I conceived of getting these sideboards together in some kind of bed situation. The only place to work was dead in front of the cabin, everybody could see me working with that fucking bed. […] I did work on it because I figured I had a practical idea. Unfortunately while I was working on it, they arrived.”18
Neal, who was never very keen on the prospect of sleeping with Allen, refused to help, so Huncke and Allen struggled with the beds. Huncke had managed to get the headboard off one and together they eventually got the other headboard off, which at least made the bed level on the ground, but it sagged in the middle and was very uncomfortable. It was also dangerous, as scorpions could reach it. “I was absolutely outraged with Burroughs for not having the sense to get a decent bed or make provision,” Ginsberg remembered. “We didn’t make out much, and that was the whole point of it. We were gonna go down there and I was finally gonna get satisfied for the first time.”19 Two days after they arrived, Allen finally accepted that Neal was not interested in men. He wrote in his journal, “The sacramental honeymoon is over. I have a drag against turning my mind to a practical, non-romantic set of arrangements a propos Cassady. Since it has at last penetrated my mind and become obvious to me that, without angling, he means what he says when he says he can’t make use of me sexually, it requires turn of mind.”
Allen’s physical demands of Neal were just as off-putting as his emotional ones. Neal told Kerouac, “I got so I couldn’t stand Allen to even touch me, you know, see, only touch me. It was terrible. And man, I’d never been that way, you know, but, man, he was all opening up and I was all…” But despite all this evidence of Neal’s real feelings, Allen wrote quite seriously in his journal, “I am wondering what will happen to Neal if I really withdraw my active queer love and leave him alone emotionally.” Neal insisted that they split up, and Allen decided to ship out from Houston to make some money, whereas Neal would stay on and help with the marijuana harvest and then drive Bill back to New York. Bill had decided that the family would be better off spending the winter in the city.
Joan and the children, accompanied by a load of baggage, went ahead by train while Bill, Huncke, and Neal Cassady drove the Jeep to New York, the back loaded with Mason jars of pot wrapped in duffel bags to sell in the city. The Jeep was not made for highway driving and when pushed beyond forty-five miles per hour everything burned out. By the time they reached New York on October 2 the car was a wreck. Burroughs said that nobody but Neal could have driven it and that he was a marvelous driver. The trip sounds a strange one. Cassady was obviously intimidated by Burroughs and his long, contemplative silences. Burroughs said, “Jack makes out Neal as a compulsive talker, but actually I’ve driven with him for eight hours and neither of us said a word. Going back to New York to sell the pot.”20 Bill never liked Cassady; he thought he was a cheap con man and didn’t see the sexual attraction that Allen felt. Relations, however, remained cordial.
Bill had arranged to meet Joan at a railroad station in New York, but they were so late that the police picked her up and took her to Bellevue for observation, thinking that she was planning to abandon her children. When Bill arrived, all it took was for him to give his address as the University Club for her to be released with apologies.
2. Texas Justice
Bill and Neal had only brought a few kilos of pot to New York; the majority of the harvest remained in Texas. The pot had not been properly cured: it was green and tasted sour, so no one was very enthusiastic about buying it. Eventually, with Huncke’s help, Bill found a buyer and made about $100. There were a few complaints that it was green, but a few hours in a low oven would have fixed it.
Bill’s parents came to see the baby at Christmas and set Bill and the family up in a beach club in Atlantic Beach on Long Beach Barrier Island, across the strait from Far Rockaway. It was an affluent summer resort and, being winter and off-season, they could get a large, comfortable room very cheaply. Bill met up with Garver and almost immediately got a new habit. He spent much of his time in the city hanging out with Garver and scoring heroin, usually with Joan in tow. One night, visiting an Italian friend of Huncke’s in Yonkers, he overdosed and passed out. Joan managed to revive him, gave him coffee, and walked him around the room until he was fully recovered.
In the spring of 1948, disappointed at his own lack of willpower in getting hooked again, Bill tried to kick using the reduction cure while driving back down to Texas from New York with Joan, but it naturally did not work. He had a sixteenth of an ounce of heroin in solution with him and a bottle of distilled water. The plan was that each day for twelve days he would take his shot and replace the same amount of junk with distilled water. After twelve days he would be shooting pure water. But it never works that way, each shot calls for an exception for some reason, and after only four days they had reached Cincinnati and he was out of junk and suffering from withdrawal symptoms. He and Joan continued to St. Louis, where Laura Burroughs tried to get him to go to “a private nut house.” Instead he opted to take the straightforward withdrawal cure again at the U.S. Narcotic Farm in Kentucky. Laura described Joan as “like a tiger” in her insistence that Bill not go to a private clinic; presumably she thought he was more likely to be cured in Lexington. He put the car in storage and took the train. He already knew the routine. Afterward he wrote to Allen from New Waverly, “Back here for several weeks and feeling O.K. at last. I had to go to Lexington for the cure. Stayed 2 weeks and was sick 3 weeks more after I got out.”21 This is the cure he describes in such acute detail in Junky.
After Lexington he managed to stay off junk for about four months. Bill tried to cut down on expenses at the farm by growing some of their own food. He contemplated buying his own chickens, and in February 1948 Arch gave him two female pigs, telling him, “You keep feedin’ ’em and they’ll be worth a heap of money.” Bill fed them on garbage. The pigs loved it and they hollered and squealed for more. “More! More! More!” They didn’t have enough garbage so they had to start buying feed at three dollars a bag. The more they fed them, the more they wanted. Finally Bill told Arch, “Look Arch, we’ve carried these fuckers as far as we can. Take ’em back!” By this time they weighed about 150 pounds. Bill said, “It got so once a week we had to buy three dollars’ worth of feed to feed these fuckers. Otherwise they’d squeal, you’ve never heard such squeals. So Arch came and took ’em back.”22 Bill enjoyed Arch’s company and went with him to the livestock market with five acorn-fed hogs in the truck. Arch would call his hogs once a day and they would come running.
On April 27, 1948, Bill, Joan, and little Billy were driving the four hundred miles south from New Waverly to Pharr, where Bill was intent on buying more land. Bill was driving and was really drunk. Staying off junk for so many months clearly had a potent effect upon his libido, because at one point, between San Antonio and Corpus Christi, they stopped the car and he and Joan got out to fuck by the side of the road, leaving Billy in the car. Someone drove past and reported them to the police, and the next thing Burroughs knew Sheriff Vail Ennis and his deputy were on the scene. They put Bill in the prowl car and took him to the Beeville jail. Bill was in overnight, and the next day Sheriff Ennis told the local magistrate, “This here feller was disturbin’ the peace while tryin’ to get a piece.” He was charged with drunken driving and public indecency, fined $173, and lost his driver’s license. Bill quickly telegrammed his parents: “For Godsakes send the money or I will be here in Beeville jail.” He was anxious to get out of there because he had fallen into the hands of one of the most vicious, brutal lawmen in the whole of Texas.
Sheriff Ennis had killed eight people, mostly Mexican American or African American, and singled out Mexican Americans for abuse: beatings, pistol-whippings, torture. Burroughs knew of him from a recent Time magazine article describing how Ennis had arrested two men for forgery and manacled them together. As he was telephoning for reinforcements one of the men pulled a concealed weapon and shot Ennis four times in the gut. Time reported, “Bleeding but upright, Vail turned from the phone, pulling his Colt from his hip holster; he pumped six shots into his manacled prisoners. Deliberately, he reloaded and pumped six more. When the smoke cleared away, both men were dead.” Ennis survived and was not charged.
He was guilty of an even more outrageous murder. On July 7, 1945, Ennis drove to the farm of Geronimo Rodriguez to serve a child custody order for not returning his children to their mother after a weekend visit. The family refused to give Ennis the children until Rodriguez returned from the fields and gave his consent. They ordered Ennis off the property. He returned with a Texas Ranger and a civilian he had deputized on the spot. He was carrying a Thompson .45 submachine gun, which he set up on a tripod outside the farm before calling to the inhabitants to come out. Felix Rodriguez, the grandfather, opened the door to see what the problem was and Ennis opened fire on him, throwing him back into the house. Felix’s two brothers, Domingo and Antonio, heard the gunfire and ran around the side of the house, only to be mowed down by Ennis. Felix’s terrified twelve-year-old granddaughter ran from the house and Ennis tried to kill her as well, but his bullets hit the water cistern. Ranger Frank Probst then threw a tear gas grenade into the house. When the gas cleared the three lawmen entered the farmhouse, finding only unarmed men, women, and children gathered around the grandfather’s body. Ennis kicked and beat them, fracturing one man’s skull with a rifle butt. In court he claimed self-defense and got off. Such was law and order in Texas in 1945. No wonder that Kells Elvins, when he heard that Bill had been arrested by Ennis, feared for his life.
Prompted by his brush with Ennis and Texas justice, Bill decided that he had had enough of Texas, and on June 5 he wrote to Allen from New Orleans to say that he and Joan were moving there. He sold the farm on June 23, 1948, for $2,000, exactly the amount he paid for it. By then the Burroughs family was living in a rooming house at 111 Transcontinental Drive in New Orleans, and on August 2 Bill bought a house at 509 Wagner Street in Algiers, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi from the French Quarter.
Chapter Eleven
My emotions became like so many strange guests. As if chapter after chapter of your life, panel after panel of your psychology were opening and shutting in the twilight.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF1
1. New Romantics
After Lucien’s trial Burroughs spent several months in St. Louis with his parents, only returning to New York City in December to be psychoanalyzed. Edie Parker maintains that his parents made his monthly allowance conditional upon him attending his analyst regularly, as they were concerned about him being in the city. Burroughs began seeing Dr. Paul Federn, who had been, along with Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s official representative as well as the vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He had escaped to the United States in 1938. Federn had a bald head, an Old Testament beard, and was once described by Freud as having “patricidal eyes.”2 It was not until 1946 that he was officially recognized as a training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. It had been Bill’s idea to see him, and his parents agreed. In the course of his analysis, Bill had a dream about Federn, that he had been offering candy to little girls without realizing he would be regarded as a pervert. When he told it to Federn, Federn said that this had actually happened. He had offered candy to children and then later worried what people would think. Apparently Federn had recorded more than thirteen hundred instances of telepathic contact between him and his patients.
Federn shot himself in 1950. His wife had died and he was suffering from incurable cancer. He differed from Freud in thinking that it was an absence rather than an excess of narcissistic libido that determined the psychotic’s problems in life. As a result his approach involved supporting the patient’s efforts at integration by trying to prevent the emergence of repressed events and by strengthening the patient’s defenses, an approach hardly conducive to identifying the event involving Nursy that so disturbed Burroughs, although Federn was perplexed by it, asking Bill, “What is this? This that could have affected you your whole life long? What happened?” All Bill could say was, “Well, Doctor, I just don’t remember, I don’t know. I don’t know.” Bill saw Federn for several months but was not particularly impressed. He had been reading a lot of Freud and was getting more and more dubious about the whole process. He saw that his analysis wasn’t going anywhere, so Federn transferred him to Dr. Lewis R. Wolberg, a hypnoanalyst and specialist in the recall of buried memories.
Burroughs was resistant to hypnosis, and in these cases, Wolberg used narcoanalysis instead, nitrous oxide or sodium pentothal to get him to a state between waking and sleeping. Many of Wolberg’s cases were battle shocked and had repressed memories because they were so horrifying. Sodium pentothal or nitrous oxide induced a light degree of anesthesia, which enabled repressed memories to surface and be dealt with. Burroughs had both treatments: when Wolberg administered nitrous oxide Bill had control of the mask, which enabled him to regulate the dose, whereas sodium pentothal, known as “the truth drug,” was administered intravenously. It is a barbiturate and knocks people out. The treatment revealed various identities or alter egos that all appeared to mirror his family upbringing: there was an English identity, derived from his Welsh nanny and his own ancestors; a southern gentleman, which was not surprising as his whole upbringing was white southern; and a Negro, which also related to his southern upbringing and Negro servants. Burroughs felt that the results, once they came, were rather banal. He did some talking in accents, but imitations of other accents and mimicries had always been one of his specialities from his college days and these were later carried over into his writing. “You have to hear your characters talking, and they talk in different voices. You have to be in a sense a medium. But in these particular sessions nothing very interesting was coming through, nothing usable.”3
Burroughs said, “He struck me as being very nice, a very well-intentioned man. He was following more or less the Freudian line, which means that the patient must provide all the information and that the analyst should not attempt any interpretation and try to force it on the patient.”4 In the end Bill said, “Well, I don’t see anything more to be gained by this.” He felt that where it could lead, it had led.
[image: image]
Burroughs had given up his Greenwich Village apartment and now moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive, lent to him by an absent friend from Harvard. It was small but had spectacular views out over the Hudson, with wonderful sunsets. He was now living close to the West End and the circle of friends he knew through Lucien.
Jack had returned to New York in October 1944 after staying with Edie and her parents, and signed on to SS Robert Treat Paine as an able-bodied seaman. While waiting to ship out, he stayed with Allen Ginsberg in his small room at the Warren Hall Residence Club and devoted his time trying, unsuccessfully, to seduce Celine Young. The Robert Treat Paine sailed from New York in mid-October, but Jack soon got into trouble. The burly boson took a fancy to him and began calling him “Pretty Boy,” “Baby Face,” and “Handsome.” Jack, fearing that he would be raped in his bunk, jumped ship in Norfolk, Virginia, and was blacklisted by the Maritime Union for a year. He returned to New York in disgrace.
Jack moved in with Ginsberg while he waited for a room to come up in Allen’s building. It was during one of their long late-night conversations that Ginsberg finally confessed to Jack that he was gay, that he was in love with Lucien and with him and wanted to sleep with him. It was the first time he had told anyone. Jack let out a long groan, not in anger but of dismay, knowing what complications were in store. In fact Allen remained a virgin for another six months, until Jack finally allowed him to blow him.
Only Allen and Celine knew that Jack was back in the city. Allen borrowed books for him from the Columbia library, and he holed up in his new garretlike room at Warren Hall and wrote. Lucien’s ideas still influenced the group, and Kerouac was voraciously reading Rimbaud, Yeats, Huxley, Claudel, Louÿs, Nietzsche, and, most particularly, Les chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, the self-styled comte de Lautréamont. Jack wrote by candlelight, and one evening he solemnly tied string around his arm as a tourniquet and cut his finger in order to inscribe “BLOOD” on a calling card, which he then labeled “The Blood of the Poet” and tacked on his wall to remind himself of his high ideals. He told Ted Berrigan, “I had a ritual once of lighting a candle and writing by its light and blowing it out when I was done for the night […] also kneeling and praying before starting—I got that from a French movie about George Frederick Handel.”5 In order to prove to himself that his art was not being produced for any commercial or practical use other than the highest artistic expression, he burned his work in the flame of the candle at the end of each day. This was because he felt he had been using the image of himself as a writer to impress people and enhance his self-image. He wrote in his journal, “Art so far has rationalized my errantry, my essential Prodigal Son behavior. It has also been the victim of an ego craving fame and superiority. I have been using art as a societal step-ladder—which proves that my renunciation of society is yet incomplete. Self-Ultimacy I saw as the new vision—but I cravenly turned it to a use in a novel designed to gain me, the man of the world, respect, idolatry, sexual success, and every other thing that goes with it. Au revoir à l’art, then.”6
When Burroughs returned to New York from St. Louis he contacted Ginsberg, who told him that Kerouac was living in the same building. Kerouac remembered, “He showed up early that December after much candle-writing and bleeding on my part, ‘My God, Jack, stop this nonsense and let’s go and have a drink.’ ”7 Bill took him to dinner and, since he was into blood and writing, to see Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film The Blood of a Poet.
Until then, Burroughs had always remained in the background, meekly accompanying Kammerer in his endless quest to find where Lucien was holding court. Bill only became central to the group over dinner; he was the one with the most money and was happy to buy dinner for Louise McMann, Jack and Edie, Allen, and the group. He was then receiving $150 a month (it went up later). Despite being only nineteen years old, Lucien Carr had always led the West End group, but with him away, both Allen and Jack felt adrift and lacking in a mentor. This led them to visit Burroughs with the conscious intention of finding the source of Lucien’s ideas, or, as Ginsberg put it, to “investigate the state of his soul.”8
2. An Alternative Education
Jack and Allen visited Bill’s apartment on Riverside Drive, where he showed them his library, introducing them to many authors they had never heard of. They knew Rimbaud, of course, and Melville’s Moby-Dick, Louis Untermeyer’s poetry anthologies, the works of John O’Hara, and Raymond Chandler and other crime novelists. Bill told them that he had a scientific approach to reading, which was both functional and pragmatic. “I read for information, I read each book for a special purpose, for instance, I read Chas Jackson’s Lost Weekend to see what alcoholism is like and St.-John Perse for the foreign perfume, the juxtaposition of strange experience and the images of cities glittering in the distance.” Burroughs particularly liked the T. S. Eliot translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis. He had books on boxing and jujitsu, which he was still studying; on parlor tricks, card games, and formulas; E. A. Wallis Budge’s Egyptian Grammar; Kovoor Behanan’s Yoga: A Scientific Evaluation; and Abrahamson’s Crime and the Human Mind. There were books on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, including hypnoanalysis. It was the literature that interested Jack and Allen most. Here they discovered Cocteau’s Opium, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Baudelaire’s Poésies, and Kafka’s The Castle. At a time when William Blake was little known in the United States, Burroughs thought Blake was a “perfect poet” and showed them Songs of Innocence and Experience. Bill’s complete Shakespeare was well used and had many marked passages. Also on his shelves were The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark; Nightwood by Djuna Barnes—one of Burroughs’s favorite books; The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell; Gogol’s Dead Souls and Nabokov’s study Nikolai Gogol. He showed them the Fischer edition of Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch, which had just been published and was to have an enormous influence on Burroughs’s work, and explained the Mayan calendar system, using a large volume of illustrations of the Mayan Codices.
Burroughs was happy to lend them books—Lucien had Bill’s copy of Yeats’s A Vision with him in jail—and gave Jack and Allen books as gifts. Jack received Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, from which he got his notion of the fellaheen. “Edify your mind, my boy,” said Burroughs.9 Allen was given an old red clothbound Liveright edition of Hart Crane’s Collected Poems; Crane’s “The Bridge” became one of the influences on “Howl.” In addition they borrowed books by Cocteau, Blake, Kafka, Joyce, and Céline.
At that time Burroughs was very keen on the work of Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist and sociologist, and often carried with him his Mind and Society,10 as well as New Science, Giambattista Vico’s circular theory of history. Lucien Carr remembered, “Bill used to say, ‘Literacy is the curse of mankind. If, however, you are cursed with literacy, all you should read is Korzybski, Pareto, and Spengler.’ And of course everyone rushed out to find out who these wonderful people were and no one could put up with Korzybski and Pareto, but Spengler we managed to fight through.”11 Korzybski, Pareto, and Spengler are virtually impenetrable to the modern reader and posterity has returned them to obscurity, but they are interesting in that they are early examples of Burroughs’s fascination with alternative social and medical systems.
Throughout his life Burroughs tried dozens of forms of self-improvement, from Scientology to est, ESP, psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box, and Reich’s vegetotherapy. He practiced the Alexander posture method, studied general semantics, Robert Monroe’s out-of-body seminar, Konstantin Raudive’s paranormal tape experiments, Major Bruce MacManaway’s Pillar of Light, the Psionic Wishing Machine, and Carlos Castaneda’s fictional Don Juan. He believed in UFOs and Whitley Strieber’s alien abductions and used the “Control” computer in London that answered questions for twelve shillings and sixpence a time. He felt that they all had something of value, but that none of them came near to really helping him.
Ginsberg and Kerouac came away with the image of Burroughs as Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy.” They found him to be courteous and dignified, a perfect gentleman, but very shy and sensitive. “Delicacy and melancholy, fragility and vulnerability, sweet and sad like a little boy,”12 was how Ginsberg remembered him. Burroughs quickly replaced Lucien Carr as the “leader” or mentor of the Columbia group. They discussed art and literature, and he soon introduced them to his other interests: psychotherapy, weapons, lowlife and nostalgie de la boue. Burroughs was usually the one with money and he was always happy to pay for meals and taxis. In those days traces of Bill as jeunesse dorée still came through, and he could be obstreperous when drunk and exhibit the bad behavior of a privileged Harvard schoolboy. Kerouac wrote, “the way he’d spit his bones out & snarl over chicken in elegant French restaurants, wrenching pollitos apart with his great healthy Anglosaxon teeth—‘Bill, we’re in a polite French restaurant!’—‘Full of la belle gashes, hey? Whup?’ ”13 Bad behavior in restaurants—picking food up in his hands and generally offending the other patrons—continued until he became friends with Brion Gysin in the late fifties, who soon put a stop to it, regarding it as the height of bad manners.
Burroughs always credited Kerouac with encouraging him to become a writer, and it was Kerouac who first created the public perception of Burroughs as Old Bull Lee. The humor, the intelligence, the idea of William as sage, as guru, all first came from Kerouac’s books. Kerouac was already a dedicated writer. He told Bill, when they first met, that he had already written over a million words and showed some of his writing to Bill, who thought it was terrible and said so. Bill Gilmore agreed with him. “I must say I didn’t think he showed any talent at all,” Burroughs said. “I don’t think he could ever have published that early stuff. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t just my opinion because when I saw On the Road I could see he really had something.” Burroughs said later, “He didn’t have much of a mind. I don’t think he had a mind at all. Like so many writers, a writer that thinks is a great rarity. He had talent and he had a voice. He never had any doubt at all about what he was going to do.”14
Jack had been working on a text based on the Kammerer killing called I Wish I Were You. He showed a short version to Burroughs and they came up with the idea of collaborating on a book, which was to be written as a hard-boiled detective story with Bill and Jack writing alternate chapters, Bill as “Will Dennison” and Jack as “Mike Ryko.” The book was credited to William Lee and John Kerouac. They began writing it that December, initially at Riverside Drive, then when the flat’s occupant returned to the city, the majority of it at Bill’s new apartment above Riordan’s Café at Columbus Circle. They called the book And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, after a radio report of a circus fire they heard while writing the book.
Bill attempted the hard-boiled style with some success: “At this point the buzzer rang. It’s a loud buzzer that goes right through you.” There was a clear separation of material and who wrote what. They would meet and read their latest section to each other. Bill would normally only grunt a noncommittal “It’s alright” or “Good,” whereas Jack wanted a more enthusiastic response. Jack’s friends were astonished that Bill had managed to get Jack to do so much work; he was famous for walking off the job. Duncan Purcell—“Uncle Dunc”—wrote to Edie to say, “I suppose [Burroughs] should be commended for keeping Kerouac at work for a longer period than ever before in history.” Their perceptions, however, were based on work other than writing. In fact, it was Kerouac who deserved the praise, because he broke Bill’s aversion to writing. “He encouraged me to write when I was not really interested in it. But stylistically, or so far as influence goes, I don’t feel close to him at all.”15 By March 1945 the book was finished and Kerouac took it to his agents, Ingersoll & Brennan, who sent it to Simon & Schuster for consideration. They were both hoping for commercial success, with Kerouac describing it to his sister as a “portrait of the ‘lost’ segment of our generation, hard-boiled, honest, and sensationally real”16—almost a definition of the Beat Generation. Alas, publishers were not overwhelmed. In August Kerouac, who was a fast, accurate typist, retyped it, possibly with a few changes. Burroughs said, “It wasn’t sensational enough to make it from that point of view, nor was it well written or interesting enough to make it on a purely literary point of view; it fell in between.”17 Nonetheless, Bill had “fun” doing it and it helped establish writing as his creative outlet. When Lucien heard what they were doing he objected vociferously, which dampened their later attempts to sell it. Years later, in discussion with Carr, James Grauerholz on behalf of the Burroughs estate agreed not to permit publication until after Carr’s death. The Kammerer killing was one of several incidents to inspire James Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, and in 2013 Kill Your Darlings, a film by John Krokidas, was made of the incident.
Bill’s apartment was above Riordan’s Café at 42 West 60th Street at Eighth Avenue, just to the west of Broadway at Columbus Circle, a run-down neighborhood on the edge of Hell’s Kitchen. The apartment opened onto an air shaft and never received sunlight; it was dirty and filled with cockroaches, although Bill soon disposed of them, and he sometimes killed a bedbug. The wallpaper was peeling away because the radiator leaked steam “when there was any steam in it to leak.”18 Bill sealed the dirty windows tight with a caulking of newspapers against the penetrating cold. He had moved there specifically to study the denizens of Eighth Avenue: the gamblers and honky-tonk types who hung around nearby Madison Square Garden; the old men’s bars; the hustlers’ bars; the junkies and tea-heads, narcotics agents and agent-provocateur bars between 44th and 42nd Streets; and Times Square itself.
Tens of thousands of servicemen passed through Times Square nightly; many were lonely country boys, in New York for the first time, all looking for booze and broads, wandering bewildered down dimmed-out Broadway until they caught the excitement of the Square, which was like a permanent celebration, a daily New Year’s Eve, watched over by the giant Camel sign at 44th and Broadway, which now featured an airman blowing smoke rings (actually steam). There were giant movie palaces and dancehalls, Loew’s State, Radio City Music Hall featuring the Rockettes dance troupe, the Palace, the Capitol, and the four-thousand-seater Paramount featuring the Benny Goodman Orchestra with its vocalist Frank Sinatra. Times Square had another, less salubrious population who preyed upon the servicemen and tourists. It was haven for the hustlers and thieves, pickpockets and amphetamine-heads, the pimps and junkies who hung out for hours talking over cold cups of coffee or dunking pound cake at Bickford’s twenty-four-hour cafeteria on 42nd Street and the twenty-four-hour Horn & Hardart Automat. There was a twenty-four-hour pinball palace there called the Pocarino where nighthawks, high on amphetamine, played pinball with speed-freak intensity illuminated by undersea, greenish-blue fluorescent light. The cinema marquees lit up the whole area, though they were dim in comparison to prewar levels, making it into a huge frenzied stage set.
3. Junk
Burroughs’s interest in lowlife began with Jack Black’s You Can’t Win and grew with his introduction to petty criminals in Chicago. He always took on the protective coloring of his friends, and in New York he had mostly socialized with Kammerer and his bohemian circle in Greenwich Village. Now that Dave was gone, Burroughs returned to his original interests. While drinking at the West End, Jack Kerouac had met Bob Brandinburg, who had moved to New York from Cleveland. He claimed to have connections in the underworld, and Kerouac introduced him to Bill. Brandinburg worked as a soda jerk at the Hamburger Mary cafeteria near Columbia, and Bill liked to stop by there in the afternoon and listen to his stories of heists and stickups. Brandinburg looked like someone from a Humphrey Bogart movie with his padded shoulders, felt hat, and flashy tie,19 and he became something of a role model for Burroughs, who took to imitating his purposeful way of walking, shoulder up as he turned a corner or sliding sideways through a doorway. Bill admired his single-minded approach to life: how he would enter a bar for a drink, have his drink, and leave with no wasted time. Bill was still in touch with Jack Anderson, and a friend of his, Hoagy Norton, had managed to steal a quantity of morphine syrettes and a tommy gun from the navy dockyard. He broke the gun into parts and took one piece a day until he had the whole thing. He never left the yard without something. Bill contacted Brandinburg to sell the stolen goods. Brandinburg said he knew someone who would want them and invited him to stop by his apartment.
Brandinburg lived with his girlfriend, Vickie, on Henry Street on the Lower East Side, under the giant steel span of the Manhattan Bridge. Their roommates were Herbert Huncke, Phil “the Sailor” White, and Bozo. Henry Street was a canyon wall of tall crumbling “old law” tenements, with tiny rooms and little light, built to house immigrants, iron fire escapes crawling over their fronts like vines. Bill stamped the snow off his feet, climbed the worn black metal stairs, and knocked at a narrow metal-fronted door. It was opened by Bozo, an overweight, flabby middle-aged queen, with tattooing on his forearms and backs of his hands.20 Bozo was the original owner of the apartment before the others moved in. He was a failed vaudeville performer who now worked as an attendant at a Turkish bath.
“Good evening,” said Bill politely, and handed him his gray snap-brimmed fedora, his gloves, and his fifteen-year-old Chesterfield overcoat with the velvet collar. Confronted by a man of obvious wealth and taste, Bozo immediately began apologizing about the state of the apartment. It was a railroad flat, with the front door opening straight onto the kitchen. Brandinburg came to greet him and introduce him to the other occupant of the room, Herbert Huncke. They sat Bill down at the kitchen table. Huncke took one look at Bill and was convinced that he was a federal narcotics agent. “Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed out from his large brown eyes like some sort of television broadcast. The effect was almost like a physical impact,” Burroughs wrote.21 Huncke was small and thin, his shirt collar too large for his neck. His skin had a spotted, translucent quality like vellum, as if a suntan were fading into a mottled yellow color. Pancake makeup had been heavily applied to cover a skin eruption. Burroughs wrote that his mouth was drawn down at the corners “in a grimace of petulant annoyance.”22 Huncke passed up the opportunity to buy the morphine and Brandinburg took Bill through a red corduroy curtain into the next room where there was a votive candle burning in front of a china Buddha.
Phil White, known as “the Sailor” because he was in the merchant marine, was lying on a studio couch but swung his legs off to say hello and smiled, showing discolored brownish teeth. Burroughs described him in Junky: “The skin of his face was smooth and brown. The cheek-bones were high and he looked Oriental. His ears stuck out at right angles from his asymmetrical skull. The eyes were brown and they had a peculiar brilliance, as though points of light were shining behind them. The light in the room glinted on the points of light in his eyes like an opal.”23
Bill explained that he was trying to dispose of seventy-five half-grain morphine syrettes. Unlike Huncke, Phil White trusted Brandinburg’s judgment that Bill was all right. Bozo appeared with a quart of Schenley’s bourbon and Phil got down to business and explained that the normal price for morphine was two dollars a grain but people wanted tablets; the syrettes had too much water in them and people had to squeeze the stuff out and cook it down unless they wanted to inject it. He offered Bill $1.50 a grain. Bill said that was all right. In the next room Bill could hear raised voices as Brandinburg assured Huncke that Bill was not a narc. The apartment was not only littered with drug paraphernalia but also contained an arsenal of weapons as well as stolen goods. Bill gave Phil his telephone number.
A few nights later, Bill used one of the syrettes.24 It was his first experience of junk. Syrettes are like toothpaste tubes, only with a needle on the end. A pin has to be pushed down the needle to pierce the seal and ready the syrette for use. Huncke later described how Burroughs had his own, fastidious way of shooting up, which consisted of rolling his shirtsleeve as high as he could get it up his arm. Then he would take a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a cotton swab, dab the cotton into the alcohol, and clean off a likely spot on his arm. “He’d look at the point on the end of the dropper to make sure that the point was good and sharp. And he’d sort of feel around his arm until he’d located the spot he thought he wanted to use. And then he’d inject the needle and squirt it in.”25
Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous.26
Phil White came over a few days after their first meeting and bought five boxes of syrettes for four dollars a box. He shot up one of them in his leg before he left. The next day he came back for ten boxes. Bill laid them out and put two to one side, saying, “These are for me.”
Phil was surprised and told him that using junk was “the worst thing that can happen to a man. We all think we can control it at first. Sometimes we don’t want to control it.” The next day he showed up and asked if Bill had changed his mind about selling the two remaining boxes. Bill said no but sold him two syrettes to use right then. Bill shot the eight remaining syrettes over the next month, then, after six weeks, he telephoned Phil to see if he had any to sell. The price had gone up to three dollars a grain. Bill bought twelve half-grain tablets in a thin glass tube and Phil apologized for the retail rate. He introduced Bill to a drugstore that sold needles without a prescription and showed him how to make a collar out of paper to fit the needle into an eyedropper: easier to use than a hypodermic syringe. He took him to a writing doctor on 102nd Street and Broadway—“making the croaker”—with a story about kidney stones. The doctor’s wife slammed the door in Bill’s face, but Phil managed to talk his way past her and get a script for twelve grains. Every few weeks Phil would ship out for two- or three-week trips. Bill was using junk, but not enough to have a habit. He was fascinated by the criminal circles he was now moving in and took to spending time at the Angler Bar where Herbert Huncke liked to hang out.
The Angler Bar, on the eastern side of Eighth Avenue at 43rd Street, wrapped itself around a jeweler on the corner, with another entrance on 43rd Street, hence its name. It was around the corner from Times Square and was, according to Ginsberg, who accompanied Bill on many of his anthropological expeditions, the hottest social-melting-pot venue in the area, filled with 42nd Street male hustlers, car thieves, second-story men, burglars attempting to offload hot goods, dealers in grass and heroin, junkies looking to score, black chauffeurs killing time, and undercover cops keeping tabs on everyone.27
Bill had bribed Huncke with spare change, drinks, and meals, and his animosity toward Bill had quickly evaporated. Kerouac described him as “a small, dark, Arabic-looking man with an oval face and huge blue eyes that were lidded wearily always, with the huge lids of a mask. […] He had the look of a man who is sincerely miserable in the world.”28 Huncke sat at the window, his half-closed eyes fixed on the street, like an alligator flopped on a mud bank waiting for prey, tracking every movement. He looked for johns to fuck, looked for marks to steal from, pockets to pick, drunks to roll, waited for dealers, waited for fences, watched for suckers, anticipating the movements of the cops. The Times Square cops despised Huncke because he lacked even the questionable morality of a thief: he would steal from anyone, friend or stranger, no matter how sick or hungry or down-and-out they were. The cops nicknamed him “the Creep,” and sometimes, when his behavior was particularly despicable, they would ban him from the Square.
Burroughs described him: “Huncke’s very prickly. I got along with him over a period of time. I saw a lot of him but he was always mooching off of somebody else, he hated to live in his own place. I didn’t dislike Huncke, we had difficulties at times. He was an argumentative, nagging sort of person, always was, always starting arguments and complaining all the time about this and that. Very much a whiner. He’s a great storyteller when he gets on a pure anecdotal, picaresque thing, about how he’s always getting the worst of it, but when he got on his self-pity kick he was terrible. It was a question of keeping him off that, then he was quite amusing.”29
At this time, Burroughs’s interests were mostly in his criminal cohorts. Of the West End crowd, he was closest to Kerouac, whom he saw all the time because they were working on the book together. When Kerouac was in Manhattan they would bar hop together. He saw something of Ginsberg but they were not as close. Kerouac had traveled, he was a seaman, he was married, whereas Allen was only nineteen, and had been no farther than New Jersey. But Allen was anxious to learn, and that Christmas he spent as much time as he could with them, when he was not studying at Columbia. He described the Times Square scene: “Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac and myself from about ’44 to ’46, probably the most formative period of early, Spenglerian mind, where that language of, Zap, Hip, Square, Beat, was provided over the Bickford cafeteria tables by Huncke. I would say Herbert Huncke is the basic originator of the ethos of Beat and the conceptions of Beat and Square.”30 Ginsberg said, “I was hanging around and tried out some of those syrettes at the same time. I took a lot of junk over the years thereafter but always irregularly and mechanically. Needle in vein and all. I made sure I didn’t take it twice in the same week, never on the same day, and always with ten days in between, or nine days or a month. Just irregularly. But I’m not a habit type—I’m a workaholic. So I started taking junk the same time as Burroughs and I observed him building a habit.”31
Bill was, in a sense, living two lives, and purposely separated them by renting a small apartment a few doors from Phil, Bozo, and Bob’s apartment on Henry Street, where he could take drugs and hang out with underworld types whom he didn’t particularly want to mix with his West End Bar friends. The rent was only ten dollars a month. Bill installed an old Victrola and a few basic amenities but it was never intended as a permanent address.
One night Bill and Jack went to Phil White’s Henry Street apartment to see if he had any morphine. The door was answered by a slim, six-foot-tall redhead, who was the only one at home. Vickie Russell, whose real name was Priscilla Arminger, was the daughter of a Detroit judge and, like Edie, was from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She was Bob Brandinburg’s girlfriend, having got off the bus at the Port Authority terminal and walked straight into the arms of a pimp named Knuckles. He held her prisoner then broke her in with a couple of 42nd Street whores. She soon got away from him and set up on her own. She wore a knuckle-duster under her glove and bought a switchblade.
She took them through to the sitting room. It had been transformed into something resembling the illicit gambling room in back of a Chinese restaurant. The walls were painted black, with black drapes over the windows. A large Chinese character was painted in red lacquer on one wall. There was a black, L-shaped couch, several red-and-black lacquered tables, and a red light bulb. On the ceiling Brandinburg had painted a large color wheel: a mosaic of triangles and squares in crude primary colors. “We get some frantic kicks out of that wheel when we’re high,” she told them. “We lay on our backs and dig the wheel and pretty soon it begins to spin. The longer you watch it, the faster it spins.”32
She suggested that they go to Times Square and score. Bill paid the cab fare, but after she tried several likely places she concluded it was too late and suggested they buy some Benzedrine inhalers and get high on them. The Smith, Kline & French Benzedrine brand inhaler, in the new plastic tube introduced in 1943, cost twenty-five cents and contained 250 milligrams of racemic amphetamine, 75 milligrams of oil of lavender, and 25 milligrams of menthol. They were perfectly legal and advertised in the press. Bill and Vickie bought a number of inhalers and went to an all-night coffee shop near 52nd and Sixth Avenue where musicians hung out after their gigs. Vickie showed them what to do. Inside the inhaler there were six white strips of blotting paper impregnated with amphetamine. They were awful to taste, but the effect of just one of those strips came on quickly and lasted for eight hours. Vickie expertly extracted the strips and gave three to Bill, telling him to roll them into a pill and wash it down with coffee. In Junky Burroughs uses this event as the subject for one of his hilarious set pieces:
[Vickie] selected some gone numbers and beat on the table with the expression of a masturbating idiot. I began talking very fast. My mouth was dry and my spit came out in round white balls—spitting cotton, it’s called. […] I was full of expansive, benevolent feelings, and suddenly wanted to call on people I hadn’t seen in months or even years, people I did not like and who did not like me.33
They got so high that Kerouac became completely disoriented on the subway back downtown and didn’t know where he was. However, he recovered enough to spend twenty-four hours in bed with Vickie at Bill’s seedy apartment.
Chapter Forty-Seven
What I am talking about is the magical theory of the universe, the magical history of the world. It’s the belief that nothing happens unless somebody wills it to happen. There are no accidents. If you see a condition of chaos it’s not because everyone’s blundering, it’s because some power intends to profit by it. Everything we see is deliberate, intended.1
1. Rocky Mountain Horror Show
Banned from the Boulderado Hotel, Billy moved into the Yeshe House, one of the Naropa Institute dormitories, only a block away from Bill at 1155 Marine. Bill saw him every day. Billy took most of his meals in the Yeshe House and for a while he was the cook there. Nonetheless, he complained to Bill (in a letter never sent) that he was living on raw potatoes while Bill was at home eating steak and sniffing cocaine. In fact the Yeshe House had enormous quantities of food; Bill had never seen such food stocks.
The Buddhists were extremely kind to Billy. They understood that the steroids made him behave in an unpredictable and sometimes crazy way and were able to deal with it. His fellow residents in the Yeshe House would often have to go to his room and try to calm him down, and sometimes people stayed over to make sure he was all right. He was constantly losing his pills and recruiting people to find them. Sometimes he raved and threatened suicide and they would impound his cutlery and any pills that looked dangerous. Once he took an overdose of Valium and had to be stomach-pumped in hospital. After that the hospital refused to prescribe any more to him. Billy’s condition made life difficult for Bill, who had to keep his guns, knives, and liquor hidden away in case Billy took them. Once Billy kept Bill up all night raging and threatening suicide. Bill sat and talked to him, keeping himself awake with tea and coffee. “Everything was my fault and it didn’t matter what happened. Tremendous ambivalence. Steroids make people extremely self-righteous, completely unrealistic, and blaming everybody else but themselves for everything that happens. It’s one of the effects of the drug, particularly when someone had a very strong tendency to do that anyway. I remember being impatient with him; I don’t remember ever losing control.”2
[image: image]
That summer Burroughs began teaching a screenwriting course. After a few weeks, one of his students, Cabell Hardy, built up enough vodka-fueled courage to go to the Varsity Manor at 10:00 p.m. and knock on Burroughs’s door. Bill invited him in. He poured Hardy a tumblerful of vodka, topped off with a little tonic, and slid it across the kitchen table. Hardy said he had come to show him his short stories about criminals and drug addicts that he had known. Bill flipped through the carefully typed pages, giving each page little more than a cursory glance so that he read through the entire portfolio of twenty stories in about two minutes. Hardy told the story in a 1999 interview:
“Is that it?” he asked. I just sat there, stunned, saying nothing.
“Very nice,” he said, and I could tell he thought no such thing. I supposed they seemed terribly amateurish, and I was completely humiliated. I was already thinking about the best way to get out of there politely when he said, “Let’s go out on the porch.”
He stepped out onto the small, railed porch through the glass door and looked over into the Varsity Apartments courtyard. In spite of the hour, most of the apartments were active and the courtyard was brightly lit. Across the way, we watched a young boy, perhaps fifteen, naked but for a swimsuit, climbing up and around the trellises that covered the inner walls of the courtyard. […] I had to admit the boy was beautiful, and said so. Bill smiled at me […] and said, “Young boys do need it special!” He laughed and put a large, heavy hand on my shoulder, and suddenly I knew everything was going to be alright.3
According to Burroughs, Cabell didn’t talk until he was six years old. He told Bill, “I couldn’t be bothered to talk.” When Cabell was in his teens, aged sixteen or seventeen, in Richmond, Virginia, he used to dress up in drag and sell himself as a transvestite hustler in order to buy heroin. He told Burroughs gravely, “This is very degrading.” His father, a lieutenant commander in the navy, got to hear about it and drove around looking for him. Cabell saw the car coming and, thinking he was a customer, seductively lifted his slit dress. Out jumped his father and took him home. Herbert Huncke told a similar story: he was picked up by the police for hustling and when his father arrived at the station house there was Huncke in a dress. His father threw him out. Huncke and Cabell had a lot in common. Cabell got busted for pushing dope and did about eight months in jail. There he put himself under the protection of the most powerful inmate he could find, which of course meant that he owned Cabell sexually.
Cabell told Bill that he only attended the course in order to meet him. He said that it was destiny. He reminded Bill of John Brady, both in character and appearance. Both were “short, dark, good-looking in sort of an awful way.”4 James likened him to a miniature Huncke. He had shifty downcast eyes and plucked his eyebrows; he had a low voice and spoke like a street hipster, so cool that it was exaggerated and sounded forced: “Everything is taken care of…” He was a very histrionic character, prone to burst into tears or a sudden rage. He loved to argue and bicker, something Burroughs couldn’t stand. He had a beautiful girlfriend, Poppy, who was working as Gregory Corso’s babysitter. She claimed to be a “confirmed” lesbian, but left her girlfriend for Cabell and saw him two or three times a week They had terrible fights, screaming and throwing dishes at each other, which Cabell enjoyed very much.
Burroughs said, “James hated him from the first moment, and he said, ‘He’s bad news. I just hate to be around him. I don’t want to be near him.’ He’s an individual.”5 Bill admitted, “Cabell was a weird and in many ways quite disagreeable character. He had his redeeming features, but the more you saw of him, the less apparent were his redeeming features. He became less and less helpful and I finally didn’t want any more to do with him.”6 The problem was, of course, sex. “We were making it for a while. Whenever it comes to sex, good judgment goes out of the window.”7 The sex may not have been all that satisfactory, as both Bill and Cabell were bottoms; however, by the end of the summer, Burroughs had invited him to move in.
Burroughs’s newfound fame brought with it many advantages. People gave him presents. One admirer presented him with a pair of Civil War–era cap-and-ball revolvers. Bill and Cabell tried them out on the man’s property outside Boulder. Another Burroughs fan, a major drug dealer whom Bill had never met before, made him a present of a half-pound chunk of raw black Thai opium as a mark of respect to the “godfather.” Bill treated this magnanimity very casually. He kept the opium in the back of his freezer and would chip off a one-gram chunk and let it thaw out until it was sticky enough to roll into a ball. He would smear the ball in vegetable oil and swallow it down, followed by a cup of Earl Grey, which warmed the drug and helped to activate it. It took about a quarter hour for them to get high. They sensibly kept the existence of this huge amount of opium a secret known only to a small group of friends, and it lasted them for many months. It did, however, precipitate a rerun of Burroughs’s famous “Playback” scenario.
Two or three times a week, Cabell and Poppy would meet at the deli in the Boulder Mall and start their day with a couple of opium pills. The owner’s attention was soon drawn to these customers who only ever ordered tea, then nodded off to sleep. One day he turned them away, saying they could come back, but next time no drugs. Cabell thought this was reasonable, but Poppy didn’t, and over drinks that evening she complained bitterly to Bill about it. Surprisingly, he agreed with her that “something should be done.”
He recounted the story of his sound and image attack that closed down the Moka Bar in London and proposed the same for the deli. But they didn’t want to close the place down, only to try out the method until they saw if it worked or not. Bill suggested they restrict themselves to tape recorders, without taking photographs. Cabell and Poppy made an hour tape while sitting at the counter nearest the kitchen and made another the following day at lunchtime. That Sunday, Bill, Cabell, and Poppy went to the deli for breakfast at 10:00 a.m. They sat in the exact middle of the room and ordered coffee. Bill carried a cassette player in his inside jacket pocket and began to play back the tape at low volume. Over the next hour he increased the volume so that you could just about hear it, but no one appeared to notice. After forty-five minutes there was a huge crash, followed by a loud argument in Greek, and one of the waiters threw down his apron and stalked out, followed by the owner, arguing loudly. The owner returned and began to scream at the serving staff, sending two of the women running to the ladies’ room in tears. Then he calmed down and took charge of the cash register. A few minutes later another huge argument broke out, this time between the owner and a customer. Poppy stopped one of the waitresses and asked what was wrong, and all the girl could say was that the owner had suddenly gone crazy without the slightest warning. Cabell wrote, “Poppy and I looked over at Bill who was calmly smiling. He said, ‘I told you it would work! Now, aren’t you glad we didn’t take photos, too?’ ”8
Bill and Cabell were constantly encouraging Billy to go somewhere to get straightened out. The hospital in Denver had a drug center where people could stay, and Billy went there for a few days but then wanted to get out. Burroughs didn’t want to confine him to a sanatorium. “It just didn’t seem right, he wasn’t dangerous. It was absolutely uncalled for. And of course he had periods in which he was better.”9 Cabell and Billy did not get along, but there was no real friction between them. Cabell was always complaining that Billy should be in a sanatorium, but it was never a real choice because Bill didn’t have the $3,000 or $4,000 a month it would have cost. Billy continued to believe that his situation was all Bill’s fault, not his, and Bill learned to live with it.
Billy wanted Bill to witness the mess he was in; he was paying him back. He lost his pills, but as Burroughs noticed, he never lost his morphine. On one occasion he took his welfare check along with his passport to identify himself and started downtown to the bank. By the time he got there he had neither one. Fortunately they were found and returned by a concerned member of the public. James offered to accompany him to the bank to cash it but Billy was insulted. However, by the time he reached the bank, both were missing again. Burroughs commented, “Obviously he just threw them away somewhere but he had no memory of this. ‘You mean to say you think I threw them away?’ I said, ‘I think exactly that. You must have. What happened to them?’ So we went back over the route but we never found them.”10 His route would have taken him over the river, and Bill thought that Billy must have thrown them in. He went to the riverbank but couldn’t see anything. The current was fairly strong, the water deep.
One of Billy’s many problems was a fistula, a part of the operation scar that had not healed properly. Because of this Dr. Starzl warned him to avoid sex. It was not a moral thing, just a grave danger of reopening the wound. Georgette had stuck with Billy when he was first in hospital and did as much for him as could be expected, but she was a practical, down-to-earth woman and had her own life to lead. It was obvious that Billy had a short life expectancy and would be an invalid for life. He was making no effort to improve the life he did have, so they separated. She moved back to Santa Cruz. In October 1977, Billy went to visit her on impulse, without making any medical planning, and found her living with a Mexican man. Although they were no longer together he found it very hard to deal with and began drinking, something the doctors had warned him to never ever do.
James noticed Billy’s voice slurring, and had first noticed that the vodka in Bill’s apartment had been watered down in the summer of 1977, even before his Santa Cruz visit. Bill didn’t believe it at first because it was inconceivable to him that anyone with a liver transplant could be stupid enough to drink. But it was true. Dr. Starzl had left, and the hospital had cut his morphine down to practically nothing. Billy could have gone on the methadone program with no trouble at all, something Burroughs thought would have been better for him than morphine, but he chose not to. He knew the doctors at the hospital and got away with murder. Anytime he had been drinking too much or was feeling in bad shape, he checked into a hospital for a week as if it were a hotel. There was nothing Bill could really do to help him. He became impossible for the Buddhists to look after and he was asked to leave the Yeshe House. Allen Ginsberg took him in while he looked for a place, but he got fed up with Billy sitting around the living room all day drinking and never throwing his beer bottles out. Allen didn’t realize what a bad state Billy was in and kept encouraging him to look for a job, but Billy was too weak to stay out of the house more than an hour and in Boulder he needed a car to get around. He asked Bill for the five hundred dollars needed for a car but Bill refused, thinking that Billy would just give the money away.
Billy had to go to the Denver hospital three times a week to get his morphine and for checkups. Finally the commuting became too much of a burden and he moved to Denver to a rooming house on Colorado Boulevard full of bums and alcoholics but very close to the hospital. Billy was in an unenviable situation. The longest a transplant recipient had ever survived was seven years, so he knew he had a limited life span. The cocktail of drugs to prevent rejection puffed up his face, and the operation itself had left a hideous suppurating scar across his abdomen that meant he always smelled bad. He was ashamed of his appearance. He lived and looked like a street person, wearing dirty clothes. He rooted around in trash cans, carrying home salvaged items of food and rubbish. Bill’s old friends in Boulder kept their distance from him and most avoided him. No one realized how sick he was.
To make life even more stressful, Cabell’s mother died while he and Bill were living together in Boulder. Cabell would tie up the phone with interminable conversations with his sister, who was an addict involved with some very destructive people. Then his sister died of an overdose and wasn’t found for a week.
2. Horror Hospital
Bill kept in close touch with Antony Balch, who came to visit him in Boulder. They had lunch at the Boulderado Hotel in the summer of 1977 and he and Bill caught up on all the gossip. James described them as “very animated together, very much bird-flapping hand, queeny.” On a trip to Paris in 1978, Bill arranged to have dinner with Antony, who, in addition to Dalmeny Court, had a modern luxury flat near the Arc de Triomphe. Antony was feeling too ill to go to Brion’s flat where Bill was staying, so they ate in a restaurant near Antony’s. Bill thought he was looking very pale and ill. Antony had a long history of ailments. He came down with a terrible depression after a bad attack of flu, diagnosed as a postviral depression, quite a common occurrence. He tried everything—alternative medicines, psychoanalysis, faith healing—but nothing worked. His business began to suffer as he went from doctor to doctor. Nothing gave him pleasure. Finally, after about a year, Burroughs read in the medical pages of Time that MAO inhibitors had often achieved remarkable cures of chronic recalcitrant depressive states. It was a dietary supplement rather than a drug, and this alleviated his condition. It came in huge bottles and Antony would take a spoonful several times a day.
Shortly after Bill’s visit, Antony flew to Los Angeles on business, but when he got back to Heathrow, one of the stewardesses saw that he was practically collapsing. The airline arranged for a car to take him home. He went to a doctor, and two days later, after an exploratory operation, they made the diagnosis of inoperable cancer of the stomach. One of the symptoms of stomach cancer particularly is an acute anemia. The doctor thought the tumor had been there “five, maybe even ten years.” Antony was told he had a year to live. It was right almost to the day. Bill thought that Antony’s depression had been precognition of the cancer, because he had already experienced several episodes of “the dying feeling.” He had an attack once at the Cannes Film Festival and the doctor told him, “No, you are not dying, this is the dying feeling. I’ve seen many people with it here, particularly at the film festival.”
It was obvious that Antony’s position was hopeless, but he refused to accept it and embarked on a course of radiation treatment that gave him a lot of pain and did nothing to cure the condition. He had terrible headaches that morphine couldn’t alleviate. Then he was sent to an interferon clinic to take part in a new program. Interferon was then incredibly expensive, $2,000 a shot, but it seemed to help. In the summer of 1979 Bill was in Amsterdam for a literary festival, staying with Harry Hoogstraten, when Antony contacted him asking to see him. Bill changed his tickets and went to London to visit him in the clinic. Antony was always attempting to lose weight as he was a big eater and had been getting fat. Now he was a shrunken stick figure. He had painkillers in every pocket of his dressing gown and gave a couple to Bill, which Bill took, just to be companionable. Antony was on heavy medication and seemed quite cheerful. His mind was not affected; he was quite alert and realized the situation he was in. They had a good long talk. Antony died on April 6, 1980.
Their last collaboration had been Bill and Tony, a very different film from their previous collaborations. Shot in 1972 on a professional soundstage and lasting just five minutes fifteen seconds, it was designed to be privately projected onto the subjects themselves in live performance, not for public exhibition. It was in color and used a fixed camera to shoot studio close-ups of two talking heads: Burroughs and Balch. There are only four shots, which are repeated once with a different soundtrack. The soundtrack is each participant announcing, “I’m Bill,” and “I’m Tony,” sometimes lip-synching, sometimes actually speaking so that sometimes it is Tony’s voice issuing from Burroughs’s mouth and vice versa. Another synchronized line is from Tod Browning’s Freaks, in which a carnival barker invites the audience to inspect a “living, breathing, monstrosity” that “once was a beautiful woman.” Balch had originally intended to call the short Who’s Who.11
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Bill had been in Europe initially to attend a major Belgian literary festival in Brussels organized by Benn Posset at Raffinerie de Plan K, an old sugar-beet factory converted into an arts center. He and Brion Gysin read from The Third Mind and were well received by an audience of ten thousand. Also on the bill were Kathy Acker, Simon Vinkenoog, and members of Cabaret Voltaire and Joy Division. Benn had arranged for Burroughs to be treated as a government guest, and at Zaventem airport he was walked straight through the border controls to a waiting car. Bill was back on drugs so his first move was to find a pharmacy. Here his enormous knowledge of the pharmacopoeia enabled him to buy a selection of over-the-counter drugs that he was able to brew up back at the hotel into something to keep him going until he reached Amsterdam. At the reading Ian Curtis from Joy Division asked if he “had any spare,” but he didn’t. Early the next day, Gerard Pas drove him to Amsterdam, where he stayed at Harry Hoogstraten’s place in De Pijp.
Pas scored for heroin on the Zeedijk. He cooked up a small dose, as Bill didn’t know the potency, and Bill asked him to inject him in the foot. Gerard wrote, “As I filled the syringe, Bill pulled off his sock, rolled up his pants and slapped his foot a bit to get the veins to stand up a bit more, making it easier for us to see. I placed the syringe on his foot on top of his vein, at a slight angle, and without waiting poked it into his vein. With those small veins, you want to make sure you don’t push the plunger too fast, as these veins can’t take the volume as easily as in the arm.”12 Ironically, one of the events in Amsterdam was a reading at a methadone clinic on the Dam across from the Nieuwe Kerk. As Bill was thought to be clean, Benn Posset had arranged for him to appear before a roomful of junkies as an example to them all. They circled around him like children at class waiting for story time. He read from Cities of the Red Night.
Changes were afoot back at Burroughs headquarters. James had now devoted four years to Burroughs and was having second thoughts about making this his life’s work. He spent from May until August 1978 in San Francisco, attempting to revive his music career. But though he had found love with Neil Cadger, he did not find a record label and decided he would try and do both by relocating back in Kansas where his fellow musicians were. He decided that he could just as easily deal with publishers, agents, and arrange reading tours from his old university town, Lawrence, Kansas, so in March 1979, William Burroughs Communications relocated there. It was his long-term plan to get Burroughs to join him. But first came the Nova Convention.
3. Nova Convention
The year 1978 ended with a celebration of Burroughs’s work in New York. This was first proposed by Sylvère Lotringer, who first met Burroughs at the Schizo-Culture Conference that he organized at Columbia University on November 13–16, 1975, where Burroughs spoke on the same platform as Michel Foucault. His original intent